The Impact of World War I on Marriages, Divorces, and Gender Relations in Europe

Sandra Brée, Saskia Hin, Sandra Brée, Saskia Hin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

How did WWI affect the love lives of ordinary citizens and their interactions as couples? This book focuses on how dramatic changes in living conditions affected key parts of the life course of ordinary citizens: marriage and divorce. Innovative in bringing together demographic and gender perspectives, contributions in this comparative volume draw on newly available micro-level data, as well as qualitative sources such as war diaries. In a first exploration intended to incite further research, it asks how patterns of marriage and divorce were affected by the war across Europe, and what the role of enduring change - or lack thereof - in gender relations was in shaping these patterns.

Part I
Something Old, Something New?

Continuity and Change in Gender Relations

1 “So Absent and So Present”

Marriage by Correspondence in France During the Great War

Martha Hanna

Two cultural narratives of France during the Great War compete for our allegiance. Gender is central to both. The first contends that the war created an unbridgeable divide between the men who fought and the women who stayed at home. Comfortably situated well behind the lines, women led lives of material ease and self-indulgence, unaware of – sometimes intentionally misinformed about – the true nature of the war. Ignorance led, inevitably, to civilian indifference and, occasionally, to outright betrayal. This narrative is by no means unique to France. It is evident, for example, in the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, whose bitter lament about the “glory of women” denounced the misguided patriotic fervor and willful ignorance of women insulated from the reality of war: women who cannot “believe that British troops ‘retire’ / When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run / Trampling the terrible corpses – blind with blood.”¹ And, as Hew Strachan observes, a similar animus infuses the collection of short stories Andreas Latzko, an Austrian novelist, published in 1918: in “Off to War,” a shell-shocked officer blames his wife (and women more generally) for having failed to prevent the mobilization of 1914: “No general could have made us go if the women hadn’t allowed us to be stacked on the trains, if they had screamed out they would never look at us again if we turned into murderers.”² In France, too, this embittered denunciation of women who failed to keep faith with the men who went to war marks the most celebrated and widely read novels of the war. In Le Feu, Henri Barbusse’s hardened soldiers are disgusted both by the appalling obliviousness of women convinced that the war is a gallant adventure and by evidence of French wives all too ready to adjust to their husbands’ absence. When Poterloo has a chance to sneak across the German lines and enter his hometown in the occupied zone of northern France, he is distraught to see his wife and child happily entertaining a group of German soldiers: “She was smiling, my wife, my Clotilde, on that day of the war! You only have to go away for a while and you don’t count any more.” He, at least, could console himself that if he were to die, Clotilde would “cry all the tears in her body for a start.” She was, he told himself, a good woman.³ Sulphart, the hero of Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois, has no such reassurance. While preparing to return home from the war, he receives a letter from his concierge, informing him that his wife has run off with a Belgian, taking almost all the family furnishings with her. All that remained of his marriage was a folding cot, a cane chair, and a souvenir calendar received as a wedding gift.⁴

A second narrative, much more unconventional and iconoclastic, is suggested by the recent film, La France. Directed by Serge Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, La France traces the odyssey of the recently married war wife, Camille Robin, who in the spring of 1917 receives a letter from her husband in which – without preface or prior indication – he tells her that she should no longer write to him. Their marriage is, for reasons unexplained and, apparently, inexplicable, over. Camille, however, is not easily deterred: determined to find her husband and affirm her love for him, she sets out, disguised as a teenage boy, on a picaresque adventure across France. As she approaches the front, she joins forces with a band of deserters who are as anxious to steer clear of the front lines as she is to infiltrate them. She and her curiously musical companions find refuge in forests near the front and come to occupy a liminal space sufficiently removed from the “home-front” as to allow women to be privy to soldiers’ confidences and camaraderie and yet too far from the guns’ lethal reach to be caught fully in the war’s grisly grasp.⁵ This alternative narrative celebrates the fidelity of France’s womenfolk and honors their resolve to remain in close communion with their men in uniform. It is, in some unexpected regards, closer to the lived reality of wartime couples, as revealed in their correspondence, than the narrative of embittered alienation that emerged with significant effect in the closing years of the war.

Camille Robin was not the only French war wife to venture towards the front, for the liminal space suggested by La France also existed in real space. Few wives were as intrepid as the pseudonymous “Armandine” who in late 1914 left her home in Brittany to join her husband in the front lines north of Arras: refused a travel permit into the heart of the military zone, she arranged to be smuggled into the front lines by hiding in a sack of potatoes.⁶ But many other wives traveled to towns on the very edge of the war zone where they stayed in seedy hotels and reunited for a few days with their husbands. The military authorities did what they could to prohibit such expeditions, but with little noticeable effect. Conjugal visits continued well into the late years of the war. Just as importantly, and certainly more often, however, the liminal zone of marital communication and reconnection suggested by La France existed in the cognitive space created by regular correspondence. In a nation of almost universal literacy where at least five million married couples were separated by the war, letter-writing became the invisible thread that bound together the home front and the military front. It was an enterprise essential to the well-being of all but the most disgruntled wartime couples.⁷ Some couples wrote every day; others every two days. To write only twice a week was, in the eyes of many, almost a dereliction of conjugal duty. Having learned in school that family correspondence, and especially correspondence exchanged between peers, should be honest, open, and an authentic expression of sentiment, husbands and wives from across France, regardless of social class, regional identity, or political allegiance, used letters to share confidences, confess insecurities, and maintain as best they could the routines of everyday life, the passion of marriage, and the affection of family.⁸

In the intermediate zone of the imagination created by marital correspondence – in which, to adapt a phrase from Henri Barbusse, husbands and wives were simultaneously “so absent and so present”⁹ – husbands provided their wives with information (often deeply unsettling information) about life at the front; wives, in turn, kept their husbands apprised of events, both small and large, in their domestic life. Letter-writing thus allowed wives to learn something of the conditions of combat without exposing them to the inconveniences of travel to the insalubrious outposts of the war zone; and it afforded husbands a regular, albeit frustratingly temporary, escape and refuge from the brutal realities of everyday life at the front. A close examination of family correspondence in wartime France suggests that the myth of female ignorance and indifference – a myth which would infuse the cultural anxieties of the postwar years – was not grounded in the lived experiences of the nation’s married couples. Yet, the images of domestic life cultivated by the regular exchange of wartime correspondence sustained, perhaps inadvertently, an equally influential myth: that after the war it would be possible to return to a world of patriarchal domesticity in which fathers would reaffirm their authority and wives embrace their maternal responsibilities. The cultural conservatism of the early 1920s, characterized by a resurgent natalism and anxieties about independent women, could be espied in the visions of domestic life so carefully cultivated in the wartime correspondence of men and women separated by war.

Front-line troops invited their wives to join them in this liminal space for reasons both public and private, testimonial and intimate. Many hoped that their letters – sometimes supplemented by trench diaries – would become a permanent written record of their military experience. Benjamin Simonet, a career officer whose experiences at Ypres in the winter of 1914–1915 made him increasingly critical of the French high command, sent his wife letters that hid little, if anything, of his anguish and increasing anxiety. He confessed that much though he would have liked to hide the worst of the war from her, it seemed “better that I can share with you as best I can my interior life. You are, thus, more unified with my existence and you understand better what we are suffering.” He also sent home his trench journal, asking that she preserve it until he could come home and use it to remind himself, and his children, of what he had endured: “For the children this will be a lesson in lived history. They will know, thanks to it, what war really is and what the patrie often demands of its children.”¹⁰ Henri Fauconnier and Barbusse also sent their carnets de guerre home at semi-regular intervals. Fauconnier vowed to pass along to his fiancée, Madeleine, his notes from the front so that she could fill in gaps created by letters written on the run and sometimes lacking in detail. He hoped that his letters would allow Madeleine, his mother, and his sisters to “see” the front, as if it were captured in a series of verbal postcards.¹¹ In early 1915 Barbusse kept a trench journal, which served as a verbal sketchbook to be drawn upon in quieter moments when composing his letters home. In the heat of battle, he said very little in his letters to his wife, beyond the oft-repeated (and by no means unimportant) observation: “What a life! It’s impossible to imagine, without having been here, such a thing that is so far from being comfortable,” yet by the end of the month, Hélyonne knew as much about the battle as words could convey and certainly as much as her husband had confided to his trench journal.¹²

Well-educated men hoped that their evocative letters would allow their wives to walk at their side and absorb, however vicariously, the sights, smells, and sounds of the front. A few months before his death at Verdun, the normalien Maurice Masson invited his wife to join him, if only in her imagination, as he made his way through his trenches:

I would like during the peaceful hours of the night to take you with me on my rounds. I see you stopping with me near to the sentries. I think that you would be unable to speak to them but that you would have to hold yourself back from embracing them.¹³

But it would be a mistake to believe that only acclaimed novelists and the graduates of France’s most prestigious schools had either the ability to convey in their letters home the brute reality ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Something Old, Something New? Continuity and Change in Gender Relations
• Part II New Kinds of Couples? Wartime Upheaval and Persistence in Marriage Patterns Before and After the War
• Part III Open Borders, Open Minds? Intercultural Marriages and Alternative Life Choices
• Contributors
• Index